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As several commenters pointed out, all of the screenshots that accompanied my Conquest of Paradiseinterview showed either Europe or usual Americas. The ones that you can see on any map. A few images of the randomly generated New Worlds had been released in developer diaries on the EU IV forums but I was expecting a video before release and, my spyglass confirms that we’re about to make a grand discovery. Land ho! See footage of the random continents and archipelagos awaiting your colonists below.

While I think this is an exciting direction for Paradox to take their DLC, abstracting a historical fact into such a significant game-changing mechanic, I’m not convinced I’ll find a great deal of use for it. I tend to stick with my EU campaigns for a few months, sneaking in an hour or two whenever I can find time. That means I might see two new worlds in the next year.

The randomised Americas aren’t the only addition to the game though. New colonial and Native American mechanics should add more depth for every player, no matter how ponderous their playthroughs.

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I honestly feel that the randomly generated continents look rather terrible. Mostly in the sense they somehow don’t fit stylistically on the same map with the old world continents. The textures, shapes, etc, seem so different. They also seem unnaturally shaped. As far as I know though, this is PDS’ first try when it comes to procedural generation or whatever it’s called these days. It’s certainly interesting that they’re exploring unexplored territory, but I reckon I won’t be using the feature much, if at all.

This historically inaccurate version of the New World is ironically more accurate in some ways. The game focuses on a European perspective [obviously], and you can’t capture the mystery opportunism of the 16th century if you know for certain that the Americas aren’t home to a race of headless monsters with faces on their torsos.

If anything, Paradox should go much farther with the idea, like creating all new flora and fauna, cities made of gold, fountains of youth, etc. After all, some of the crazy things people were looking for turned out to be real, at least in their vague world-changingness. Imagine France before tobacco, Italy before tomatoes, and Ireland before potacco. You can’t do it, so let’s have computers randomly generate the sim-equivalent for corn.

I think the best part about this DLC is that it seems entirely optional. If you are interested in playing Native Americans or interested in a more mysterious colonization of the New World, you can elect to do so. If you enjoy your European/Asian/African escapades more, or are attached to the way the New World currently works, you can simply choose to ignore this DLC. I think it’s interesting and will probably give it a look.

I have to believe you can choose to have the Americas look like the Americas if you want to, since they show you the map when you first load up. But I love this idea, especially because it was just in the last century that we got a truly accurate idea of the boundaries of this part of the world. The first few centuries looked like this, even to explorers and mapmakers:

Yes, this makes the game suddenly worth playing. For me, the historical settings are of marginal interest only. A ranom new world is a pretty good start, however fully random map would be absolutely fantastic.

I’ve never had negative feels for new content for Paradox games up until this point. The random maps look interesting and I would love to play them with my friends, but the whole system of colonial states seems, at best, boring and, at worst, obnoxious.

That actually sums up most of EU. At best it is an exercise in spreadsheeting a world conquest under arbitrary and meaningless rules. At worst it is an enactment of Paradox’s cultural and political stereotypes. Like Irish getting a “republican tradition” boost because… why? Because Ireland would one day become a republic centuries after the game’s timeframe? They’ve freely admitted that the deepest research they use in making the games is wikipedia.

It looks like they’re approaching this with the CK2 model in mind. Except…

Well.

I mean, this isn’t a bad game. Not by any means. I’ve played about thirty hours of it. But I feel that I’ve seen all that there is to see. I don’t see what this DLC is adding to the core game to lure me back to it, really. It’s not Crusader Kings, and it just doesn’t feel like it has a huge amount of replayability, and unless the DLC makes the game drastically more interesting, I just don’t see myself purchasing it.

I don’t like this. Don’t we have Colonization and Civilizationa for this ?
I don’t like this route that Paradox have taken with this series, EU have gone long way from EU2 with AGPEPP Mod to this. I’m not saying EU was a historical game before and at least it has a strong historical falvour of moving your contry from Medival times to modern era. Now it looks all fantasy to me drowned with oboxios mechanics, filling the buckets, ideas doesn’t making too much sense, general streamlining that as much helps new players as braindead AI (so we can’t write AI that could understand mechanism of defensive strategy at wars, so let’s make defensive strategy not viable but ludicruosly underpowered fortress and bulshit reinfercemnts).